Currents in insulators

Ultrafast helicity control of surface currents in topological insulators with near-unity fidelity

In recent years, a class of solid-state materials, called three-dimensional topological insulators, has emerged. In the bulk, a topological insulator behaves like an ordinary insulator with a band gap. At the surface, conducting gapless states exist showing remarkable properties such as helical Dirac dispersion and suppression of backscattering of spin-polarized charge carriers. The characteriz...

Doped Mott insulators are insulators: hole localization in the cuprates.

We demonstrate that a Mott insulator lightly doped with holes is still an insulator at low temperature even without disorder. Hole localization obtains because the chemical potential lies in a pseudogap which has a vanishing density of states at zero temperature. The energy scale for the pseudogap is set by the nearest-neighbor singlet-triplet splitting. As this energy scale vanishes if transit...

Plasmonics in Topological Insulators

With strong spin-orbit coupling, topological insulators have an insulating bulk state, characterized by a band gap, and a conducting surface state, characterized by a Dirac cone. Plasmons in topological insulators show high frequency-tunability in the mid-infrared and terahertz spectral regions with transverse spin oscillations, also called “spin-plasmons”. This paper presents a discussion and ...

Topological insulators

Chromatin insulators.

Active and silenced chromatin domains are often in close juxtaposition to one another, and enhancer and silencer elements operate over large distances to regulate the genes in these domains. The lack of promiscuity in the function of these elements suggests that active mechanisms exist to restrict their activity. Insulators are DNA elements that restrict the effects of long-range regulatory ele...